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What does good customer service entail? Being accessible for your customers? Resolving queries? Sharing information? Helping out when there's trouble? Having personalized conversations? Is it perhaps all of the above?
Offering good customer service means offering a good customer experience. Regardless of the reason your customers reach out for support, the experience that they have with your business should be frictionless, fast, effective, and personal. Deploy the right tools, reduce handling times, and be accessible for your customers on their preferred channels.
Why SMS?
SMS is one of the oldest text messaging services. It launched in the 1990's, and it's still going strong today. As of 2023, there are almost 8,9 mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, which exceeds the global population! This is because a growing number of people currently has more than one subscription, often for various different reasons. For example a work versus a private phone subscription. This creates a huge opportunity for SMS messaging, which relies solely on a mobile service connection to send its messages. On top of that, most - if not all- mobile phones have a native SMS app built in, which gives SMS an extensive global reach and makes it one of the most reliable messaging channels.
Read more about the popularity of SMS in 2024 and its added value.
Be Where Your Customers Are
When providing customer support, it's important to be where your customers are. That means, be accessible on the messaging channels that your customers are already using and are familiar with.
Though the newer social messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messaging, and Line are incredibly popular, there are still places where SMS is king. Sweden ranks SMS as the top used messaging channel, and in the US and Canada, SMS is also still widely used as the number one text messaging service. 92 million people use text messages in North America, which is 80% of the total population. The most people who send text messages in the world are located in China and India. China comes first with 1,081 million people and India second with 730 million. Though SMS may not be considered the favorite channel in those countries, these are still numbers to be reckoned with.
Does that mean that SMS customer support is only useful for those audiences? Not at all! SMS has the added benefit of being a native app on almost phones, giving it an enormous reach. Even if it may not be the favorite or preferred channel of your target audience - not everybody has WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, or internet access. SMS a great fallback channel to make sure your customer service is accessible to the vast majority of your audience, even the ones without reliable internet access.
Please note that if you want to use SMS for customer service in the United States, you'll need to adopt 10DLC to align with the current regulations.
SMS Customer Support
Now, I can already hear you thinking: Customer support via SMS? How does that even work? Isn't SMS a one-way channel? SMS is often employed as a one-way or broadcasting channel, but it also allows two-way communication and support in the same way the other messaging apps do. For customer support, SMS can add value both as a one-way, and a two-way channel.
SMS Support Notifications
The most popular use case for SMS employs one-way communication: notifications. Sending announcements, alerts, and account updates is a valuable addition to any support strategy. Let your customers know when something changes in their account (settings) and alert them of new launches, security threats, outages - anything that may be relevant for your customers. This way, SMS can inform customers at scale, putting them at ease and relieving some pressure on your other customer support channels.
Live Chat Via SMS
Direct live customer support via SMS is accessible and quick. But how do you manage this with SMS? Two-way SMS support is often done via an SMS and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration, like our Mobile Service Cloud solution. By integrating SMS as a channel into an existing platform, managing the different chats becomes easy.
Live chat via SMS will give customers the experience of an informal and personal conversation. Make sure that you offer your customers a personalized connection with your customer service representatives to fully enhance the customer experience.
Text messaging gave our customers a direct channel to our business. It felt like more of a conversation, rather than a series of information snippets.
- Norm Schneider, founder of Cash for Gold USA
Feedback Via SMS
Want to improve the services you offer your customers to boost those customer satisfaction rates? Then you need to learn from their feedback. Send SMS surveys to customers and gather valuable insights in how they perceive your business and your services.
What makes SMS the perfect channel for this? It boasts open rates as high as 98% compared to email, which means that your surveys not only reach the phones of your audience, they also are also being read! As many as 45% of people admit they will engage with branded text messages or surveys they receive.
With our SMS solution, you can create feedback pages and share the link via SMS. The input received will be added to your Customer Data Platform directly, so you'll have everything in one overview!
Enhance Your Customer Service With SMS
Is SMS still a widely used and popular channel amongst your target audience? Do you want to offer personal support in a conversational-style setting? Is internet an unreliable factor for (parts of) your target audience? Do you want to gather insights in he opinions and experiences of your customers? Do you want to make sure your services are accessible?
Did you answer 'yes' to one or more of the questions above? Then consider SMS as part of your communication and customer service strategy. Check out CM.com's SMS Messaging solutions below, and feel free to reach out to one of our experts to discuss the possibilities for your business.
